Premature birth places infants at increased risk for learning disabilities, delayed development of speech, language and motor skills, and mortality. The premature infant often has difficulties with respiration and feeding and therefore may remain in the hospital for prolonged periods of time. The nutritive suck (NS) in a premature infant may be underdeveloped and/or unorganized. A NS is typically used when breastfeeding or bottle-feeding and provides an infant with essential nutrition. The non-nutritive suck (NNS) is a motor behavior that can be observed and used to make inference about brain development and organization in this young population.
It is estimated that approximately 15 million premature infants are born worldwide with approximately 12% of those (500,000) being born in the United States. Studies have shown that approximately 55% of preterm infants have problematic feeding behaviors by 6-18 months of age, while preterm infants are 3.6 times more likely to have feeding problems than full-term infants are at 6 years of age. In addition, patients having congenital heart defects or other neurological disorders may have diminished abilities to feed orally. Moreover, parents of children with feeding problems report increased stress, anxiety and diminished family functioning.
Oral stimulation therapy is a common practice, in which feeding therapists manually apply a stimulation using their fingertip. Manually applying stimulation, however, has a number of drawbacks. One such drawback includes the variance in the amount of motion (amplitude) and rhythm (frequency) from therapist to therapist, or even by the same individual. As a result, extensive and costly training and experience are required for a therapist to be proficient at providing manual stimulation and assessment.
In addition, manual stimulation is given essentially blind, as patients can respond by producing a variety of undesirable motor actions, including but not limited to clenching the jaws, tongue compression, tongue thrusting, or other reactions that may be confused with desirable NNS events or NS events. As such, it can be difficult to determine if the manual stimulation is beneficial to the patient.
Therefore, a need exists for an automated system and method of using the system to assess a patient's natural NNS pattern and to provide precise and beneficial tactile stimulus to correct and organize the patients NNS pattern and a system and method to assess a patient's nutritive suck (NS) pattern to efficiently improve the oral feeding capabilities of patients.